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We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it.

I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.” Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you think the L.L.M.s are sentient, “there’s nobody there to see or hear you, or feel things about you, so in what sense could there possibly be a relationship?” While drafting our article “In Praise of Empathic A.I.,” my co-authors (Michael Inzlicht, C. Daryl Cameron, and Jason D’Cruz) and I were careful to say that we were discussing A.I.s that give a convincing impression of empathy. Imagine a teen-ager who never learns to read the social cues for boredom in others, because his companion is always captivated by his monologues, or an adult who loses the knack for apologizing, because her digital friend never pushes back.

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